Those of us who have been following the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board budget closely are participating in a collective exhale of relief today. The Board of Estimate and Taxation approved the maximum levy requested by MPRB, preserving the path for its proposed 2027 budget to move forward intact.

That relief comes within an extraordinarily difficult financial environment. More of the cost of local government is being shifted onto residential property taxpayers, not only homeowners, but renters who experience those increases through their rents. Asking residents to accept another increase required more than a declaration of need. It required a credible explanation of why the increase was necessary.

A significant part of that explanation involved fulfilling long-standing commitments to North Commons Park, Upper Harbor Park and other investments that have been planned and developed over many years. These are not extravagant new promises conceived overnight. They are commitments made to communities that have historically received less investment and that reasonably expect those promises to be kept.

Public trust showed up during this process. Residents attended meetings, contacted public officials and spoke in support of allowing the Park Board to maintain services, absorb rising operating costs and open these long-awaited facilities responsibly. That support mattered.

But now that we can exhale, we should also look ahead.

Inside the proposed 2027 budget is a planned budget for 2028. It includes projected spending, revenue and staffing levels that continue something close to the current rate of growth. The General Fund increases from approximately $114.4 million in 2026 to $120.8 million in 2027, a 5.6% increase, and then to approximately $126.6 million in 2028, another 4.8%.

Property-tax revenue is projected to rise from approximately $98.5 million in 2027 to nearly $103 million in 2028, an increase of about 4.5%.

So what is driving growth at this pace?

The justification for 2027 was tied to identifiable circumstances: rising wages, health-insurance and operating costs, along with the cost of operating North Commons, Upper Harbor and other new or improved amenities. Those explanations helped the public understand why this year was exceptional.

But what will the explanation be next year?

What projects or service demands will be named at the next budget hearing? How much of the 2028 increase will be required simply to maintain the new 2027 service level? How much will result from inflation and contractual obligations? How much will support additional staffing, programming or expansion? And to what extent will the Park Board again ask the public to accept an increase based on another collection of exceptional circumstances?

Just as importantly, how will the public respond if this becomes the annual message?

I invite MPRB leadership and commissioners to examine these questions sooner rather than later. The financial circumstances facing Minneapolis residents are unlikely to look dramatically different a year from now. Short of a remarkable recovery in the city’s commercial tax base, homeowners and renters will continue carrying a substantial share of the burden.

We should not treat the 2027 budget as simply another point on a continuously rising trend line. Until the context of our property tax situation changes considerably, perhaps it should be understood as a terrace, a new level of service that we are grateful to have reached and one that we should now work to stabilize and protect.

That would mean resisting the impulse to continue scaling upward, perhaps for a year or two, while we all get our feet underneath us. It would mean demonstrating that new facilities and programs can be operated successfully, that existing assets can be properly cared for, and that the Park Board can distinguish between what is essential to sustain and what would represent further expansion, especially while residents face uncertain economic conditions and growing financial pressures from other levels of government.

It would also create an opportunity to examine whether spending is aligned with the priorities the Park Board has identified. Some responsibilities, including the stewardship and ecological restoration of natural areas, are described as growing priorities. Before continuing the overall expansion of the budget, it would be valuable to understand whether those priorities are receiving resources proportionate to their stated importance. That is a larger subject for another time, but it belongs within this discussion.
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A pause in overall growth would not mean retreating from the commitments made in 2027. It would mean protecting them, while giving the Park Board time to stabilize this new level of service, preserve public confidence and ensure that future investments are not only financially sustainable, but aligned with its publicly agreed-upon strategic priorities.

Among the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board funding issues I plan to explore in the future are budget constraints and the effects of property taxes. Those issues came to a head last night when the Board of Estimate and Taxation approved the full proposed 2027 budget, including a 5.86% increase.As MPRB leaders seek public input on revenue-generating ideas, here are several possibilities that come to mind that I believe are worth exploring.

Speeding enforcement — During peak hours, Minneapolis parkways with high traffic volumes may present opportunities to generate revenue while improving public safety through stronger speed-limit enforcement. Cedar Lake Parkway is one obvious location. MPRB could also examine whether current fines are high enough to meaningfully discourage speeding.

Shoreline-access fees for adjacent residential property owners — Along the east side of Cedar Lake Park, are there opportunities to charge or increase fees for residential property owners who install seasonal docks extending from public parkland? There may currently be some type of waiver or permit process. MPRB could examine the effects of these private structures on public shorelines and determine whether appropriate fees should help support shoreline management and restoration.

Enforcement of parkway right-of-way vegetation requirements — Overgrown vegetation and invasive plants extending from private property into parkway rights-of-way can create safety hazards. MPRB could provide property owners with notice and a reasonable period—perhaps 30 days—to correct the problem. If the work is not completed, MPRB could perform it and assess the property owner for the full cost, including an administrative fee, or impose a daily fine where legally permitted.

Fees for private organizations using undeveloped watercraft-access points — Private organizations that regularly use undeveloped park access points to launch watercraft could be charged appropriate access or use fees. If fees already exist, MPRB could evaluate demand and determine whether higher rates would generate additional revenue without significantly discouraging appropriate use.

Merchandising — Minneapolis parks have strong identities and inspire deep public affection. MPRB could generate revenue through thoughtfully designed merchandise connected to individual parks and the park system as a whole. I explored this idea in more detail in “Before We Sell Naming Rights, Let’s Look at What We Already Have.”

Make donating easier—and connect donations to specific needs — Many park visitors live outside Minneapolis and therefore do not directly support the system through Minneapolis property taxes. Some see and appreciate the work being done by volunteers and want to contribute.

They could be directed to nonprofit partners such as the Cedar Lake Park Association. MPRB could also create a simple way to donate toward specific park needs while sharing the benefits across the city. Under a model I call Twin Giving, half of each contribution could support the locally identified project and half could go into a fund supporting natural areas in underserved neighborhoods.

I explored that proposal in “Twin Giving—Growing One Park While Caring for All.”
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Stop the bleeding - The park board has an "Enterprise Fund". There is one superstar in that portfolio, Sea Salt. But some of the entities are incurring big losses that have big impacts on the potential income. I did the research and wrote about this issue, focused on Pimento at Bde Maka Ska last month in the Hill & Lake Press.

Do you have ideas? Please share them with your Park Board Commissioner or with staff.

A conversation with a documentarian
Part of what has made the past seven years of performing ecological restoration at Cedar Lake Point Beach as a volunteer Minneapolis Park & Recreation Board Park Steward has been the people I meet.

One special person is a guy named Chris Harrington. Last year, we met for coffee and he told me about a video project he was working on and he later described it this way:

The Animacy Project
Last Summer, I biked through all 88 Minneapolis neighborhoods and began to document the surprising growth of native habitat gardens. To my surprise, I found them on most residential blocks! I am making a documentary to explore what it is that motivates our communities to re-wild their yards, boulevards, and public spaces and re-establish a relationship with the land. The Animacy Project will also explore how language and culture impact one’s relationship with the natural world. Because I live on Dakota land in Minneapolis, I will feature conversations with members of the Dakota communtiy - to seek to understand how their language speaks of all that is wild with respect, kinship; as someones, not somethings.

The project will also feature art from Lakota Ledger Artist Joe Pulliam.

Conversation from Cedar Lake Point Beach
Chris shared with a few weeks ago that he was progressing with the project and we scheduled a time to meet again, this time at Cedar Lake Point Beach where he asked me some questions and video taped it.

Full videos are uploaded to my You Tube page to view if interested. I did a short take of Part 3 because some of these are on the longer side.

Part 1 - Introduction to the problem and approach to solving it
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Part 2 - Shoreline management, a critical project component
Part 3 - Creating healthy places for all
1 minute version of Part 3


If you wish, please let me know what you think
Thanks!

Unlike mission or value statements, budgets express priorities. In the best case, the public and the public organization share a sense of those priorities. But first, the public has to be able to understand the budget clearly enough to determine whether it reflects them.

The Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board recently presented its proposed 2027 budget to the Board of Estimate and Taxation and needs public support for increased property taxes, which account for the bulk of Park Board funding. This week, the Park Board requested a 5.86 percent property-tax levy increase, while the mayor’s recommended budget included a 2.5 percent placeholder.

After attending two Park Board community budget hearings and studying the available figures as best I could, I supported the Park Board’s request and sent an email to BET members urging them to support the proposed budget increase. I wrote a blog and urged other citizens to do the same.

From what I could tell, the Park Board had identified real cost pressures: wages and employee benefits, inflation in goods and services, and the operating costs of new and expanded facilities. Those facilities were long in development, and the costs of operating them are coming due in the year ahead. Limiting the levy increase to 2.5 percent would, according to the Park Board, leave a $3.12 million General Fund gap and potentially require substantial service reductions.

I do not think the Park Board should be forced to absorb new facilities, increased labor costs, and inflation without sufficient operating revenue. I also believe the City and the Park Board should carefully examine potential efficiencies, competing needs, and the cumulative burden on taxpayers.

But supporting the Park Board’s overall budget request does not mean abandoning questions about what is inside the budget.

In fact, it makes those questions more important.

The proposed 2027 Park Board budget is approximately $171 million and includes 1,021.69 full-time-equivalent positions. Somewhere within all those dollars and people is the public investment being made in caring for the natural areas of the Minneapolis park system.

I wanted to find it so I could explain it. It seemed as though that should be simple. It wasn’t.

Finding the Seed
Looking through the Park Board budget can feel a little like sifting through soil in search of a seed.

There is a lot there: departments, divisions, programs, funding sources, grants, positions, initiatives, priorities, strategies, performance goals, racial-equity plans, and a glossary of still more terms. They represent things the Park Board has chosen to do and things the public has chosen to support. I began to familiarize myself with the annual documents.

And I was looking for something quite specific: an answer to a question that has become more vivid through my involvement as a Park Steward and as a board member of the Cedar Lake Park Association.

What resources are actually devoted to caring for the Park Board’s natural areas?
I started with Environmental Stewardship. As a volunteer Park Steward, that seemed like the logical place. But Environmental Stewardship encompasses so much more than natural-area restoration. Follow the organizational structure farther and you arrive at Environmental Management, which includes environmental education, youth employment, water resources, Natural Resources, and other functions. At first, the historical budget appears to offer an answer. Over time, the amount reported under Environmental Management has grown substantially. But the total tells us how large the organizational container is, not how much of it is devoted to managing natural areas.

All of those may be worthwhile. But the category did not tell me how much of the investment was actually reaching the land, water, habitats, and ecological systems themselves.

Last night I attended one of the public meetings that Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board executives and finance staff are holding across the city to explain the proposed budget, especially in the context of Mayor Frey’s recommendation to limit the Park Board’s property-tax levy increase to well below what the Board says it needs to maintain operations.

Top line
As a strong supporter and advocate for our city and its parks, I believe we need to be thoughtful, productively critical, and attentive to compelling needs and sometimes competing priorities. I will continue to question and, when necessary, challenge decisions, policies, and business as usual.

The City and the Park Board should work toward a responsible agreement. In this case, I do not see a persuasive justification for limiting the Park Board’s levy increase to 2.5%. If that limit is adopted, the Park Board says it could force staffing and service reductions that would fall especially hard on residents who benefit most from our network of parks and recreation centers, as well as from the health and community benefits that could come from greater access to a healthy natural environment.

I support the MPRB’s request for a 5.86% levy increase and oppose the mayor’s recommended 2.5% cap.

What is happening
The Park Board is a separately elected, semi-autonomous body. The mayor does not directly set its budget. The Board of Estimate and Taxation (BET), however, sets the maximum property-tax levy the Park Board may collect, and the Park Board then adopts its budget within that limit.
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The mayor’s recommended budget goes to the BET on September 23, when the BET is expected to set maximum levies. The mayor recommends a 2.5% increase in the Park Board levy from 2026 to 2027. The MPRB is requesting 5.86%. The mayor has described the 2.5% figure as a placeholder and has said discussions with Park Board commissioners and staff will continue. In an August 19 Better Minneapolis interview, Park Board President Tom Olsen said the mayor had indicated that the figure could be negotiated upward, potentially to 3.5%, as a "showing of good faith." Meanwhile, the mayor’s recommended city budget calls for an 11.3% increase in the overall City property-tax levy. Source: Better Minneapolis interview with Tom Olsen
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The Park Board warns that the 2.5% limit could result in the loss of up to 26 employees. Separately, its proposed budget adds roughly 26 full-time-equivalent positions systemwide, in part to operate new and expanded facilities such as North Commons Park and the Upper Harbor development. Those planned additions are not necessarily the same positions the Park Board says could be lost under the lower levy. The timing creates a difficult convergence: projects approved years ago are opening just as City costs are rising and downtown commercial property values have declined.

Over the years, especially when compared with the City, the Park Board has contained spending and generally acted as a responsible steward of a highly regarded park system. According to the MPRB, its property-tax levy increased 63% over the past decade while the City’s increased 104%. MinnPost reported that the MPRB’s share of the overall Minneapolis property-tax levy has declined slightly, from about 18.5% a decade ago to roughly 17% today. The MPRB says it has held annual increases below the City’s by budgeting for vacancy savings, reorganizing rather than expanding staff to meet some support-service needs, and using budget and hiring freezes.
Sources: MinnPost’s analysis of the Minneapolis budget and the MPRB’s official 2027-2028 budget response.

What you can do
On Wednesday, September 23, at 4 p.m., the BET is expected to set the maximum property-tax levies. Before then, contact BET members and offer your views on the MPRB’s requested 5.86% increase:
·       Elected member Steve Brandt: [email protected]
·       Elected member Eric Harris Bernstein: [email protected]
·       Mayor Jacob Frey: [email protected]
·       City Council President Elliott Payne: [email protected]
·       MPRB President Tom Olsen: [email protected]
·       City Council Budget Committee Chair Aisha Chughtai: [email protected]

Learn more about the two elected members of the BET.

​Attend or watch the September 23 BET meeting. See the City’s meeting participation information.

White snakeroot shows how a landscape responds when buckthorn finally releases its hold
Something striking is happening around Cedar Lake Point Beach these days. Walk through one of the areas where buckthorn has recently been removed and the woodland floor seems to have turned white.
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It is white snakeroot.

A yellowjacket sting, an underground home, and knowing when to step back

Ouch!

When I woke up this morning, I was reminded of the sting I received after disturbing a yellowjacket nest while working in the woods yesterday. It was actually the second time in two weeks that I had unknowingly bothered a colony buried in the ground while removing buckthorn and other unwanted plants as part of our restoration work.

The first sting—or, in last week’s encounter, multiple stings—was incredibly intense. Strangely, yesterday’s sting landed in almost the same place: my left ankle, through my sock. Thankfully, this time there was only one.

I continued working. The pain initially seemed manageable. But at about five o’clock, while I was preparing dinner, my foot began to swell and throb. I spent the rest of the evening with it elevated, applying ice and treating the reaction with Benadryl.

The experience got me wondering about what I had disturbed.

Let’s be honest: I was the invader. I had entered the residence of another species doing its part within the ecological network we all inhabit. The yellowjackets did not know that I was removing buckthorn or trying to restore native habitat. They knew only that something enormous was pulling vegetation, shaking the ground and threatening their home. The least I could do was learn who they were, how they lived and where they fit within that network.

A sting, not a bite
Although I instinctively called it a bee sting—and later wondered whether it had been a bite—it was almost certainly a yellowjacket sting.

A bite is delivered with an animal’s mouthparts. A sting comes from the opposite end: a modified egg-laying structure that punctures the skin and delivers venom. That means only female bees and wasps can sting. Yellowjackets can also use their jaws to grip, but it is the stinger that causes the immediate, burning pain and injects the venom.

The venom begins acting on the tissue immediately, activating pain-sensing nerves and triggering inflammation. Then the immune system joins in. Blood vessels widen and become more permeable, allowing fluid and immune cells into the surrounding tissue. That helps explain why my ankle hurt immediately but my entire foot became swollen hours later. The expanding swelling was not venom slowly traveling through my foot. It was my own inflammatory response spreading well beyond the point of entry.

Bee, wasp or hornet?
Bees and wasps are close relatives, so our confusion is understandable. Bees evolved from predatory wasp ancestors, but over time shifted toward collecting pollen and nectar to feed their young. Their usually hairier bodies help them carry pollen from flower to flower.

Wasps are generally smoother-bodied. Adults often feed on nectar, fruit and other sources of sugar, while many provide animal protein to their developing larvae. Yellowjacket workers capture caterpillars, flies and other insects and also scavenge meat. They chew this food and carry it back to the nest. In that role, they help regulate other insect populations.

They also pollinate flowers, though generally less efficiently than bees. And they become food themselves—for birds, spiders, dragonflies, robber flies, amphibians and mammals. Skunks and raccoons may dig into their nests to eat the larvae and pupae. Yellowjackets are therefore both predators and prey, transferring energy in several directions through the food web.

Then there are hornets. Hornets are not a completely separate category from wasps; they are one branch of the wasp family. The large gray, football-shaped nest we sometimes see hanging in a tree in Minnesota is commonly made by the bald-faced hornet. Despite its name, the bald-faced hornet is technically a kind of aerial yellowjacket.

So a yellowjacket is a wasp. A bald-faced hornet that also hangs in the woods is also a wasp—and, more particularly, an aerial yellowjacket. A bee is a close relative that adopted a different way of feeding its offspring.

The labels matter, but nature rarely arranges itself into the perfectly separate boxes we create for it.

As a twin, I know something about being placed in the wrong box. My brother and I are not different species, of course, but we are different people—something others did not always recognize. In junior high, Don nearly picked a fight with me because he thought I was my brother. Being mistaken for somebody else can be humorous, frustrating and, apparently, occasionally hazardous.

A paper home beneath the soil
The yellowjackets’ underground residence is far more sophisticated than the small entrance hole suggests.

The colony often begins in an abandoned mouse, vole or chipmunk burrow. A narrow passage leads to a larger chamber, which the workers enlarge by carrying away soil. Inside that hollow space hangs an elaborate paper structure.

Workers scrape weathered wood from dead branches, logs, fences and other surfaces. They chew those fibers, mix them with saliva and spread the resulting pulp into thin sheets. As it dries, it becomes paper—sometimes marked with bands of gray and brown reflecting the different sources of wood fiber.

Within the nest are multiple horizontal combs stacked in tiers, like the floors of an apartment building. Hundreds or even thousands of downward-facing hexagonal cells hold eggs, larvae and pupae. Around the combs, the workers construct several layers of paper envelope. Air spaces between those layers and the inner combs provide room for movement and help regulate temperature and moisture.

I was working at Cedar Lake Point Beach this morning, continuing the slow work of restoring a small piece of Minneapolis’s natural landscape, while listening to Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire.

It’s a fascinating read, or in my case, listen, about the relationship between people and plants and the ways plants have succeeded by making themselves appealing to survive. Pollan turns our usual understanding of domestication around. Perhaps humans are not simply manipulating plants. Perhaps plants, by satisfying our desires, have enlisted us to spread them as well. That reciprocal relationship is the central premise of the book. 

At one point, while discussing Monsanto’s genetically engineered NewLeaf potato, Pollan turns to what he calls “biological pollution”, the possibility that changes introduced into living systems can escape our control and alter ecological relationships in ways that may be difficult to contain. 

I didn’t have to look very far to make my own connection.

Around me were buckthorn, white mulberry and other invasive plants, the kinds of plants I and other volunteers have spent years removing as part of an effort to restore the diversity and ecological relationships of Minneapolis’s roughly 1,200 acres of public natural areas.

Then I noticed someone working along the beach.

She was a water-quality technician, accompanied by two others who appeared to be trainees, taking samples from Cedar Lake. I almost stopped her as she approached the official Park Board vehicle parked nearby to ask a few questions. But I was absorbed in Pollan’s book and figured she didn’t need to be interrupted from doing her real job.

Then the juxtaposition struck me.

We test the water.

We have standards for it. We sample it regularly. We employ people with the expertise to measure it. We collect data over time so we can recognize when conditions are deteriorating and, ideally, respond.

And we should.

Water may be our most immediate sensory connection with environmental quality. We drink it. We swim in it. We look across it. When a lake turns green with algae, smells bad or becomes unsafe for swimming, people recognize that something is wrong.

Water quality has consequently earned a place in our institutional structure, our staffing and our budgets. But I found myself looking back from the lake toward the woods and wondering:

Why don’t we treat the ecological quality of the land with the same seriousness and regularity?

The Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board actually has measured the ecological health of its natural areas.

Ecologists conducted field assessments during the 2018 and 2019 growing seasons for MPRB’s Natural Areas Plan Phase II. The results were sobering if not disturbing. Not a single acre assessed received the highest ecological-quality rating of A. Only 3.3 percent of the acreage ranked between B and BC, while 84.8 percent fell between CD and the lowest category, Non-Native.

In other words, the Park Board already has evidence that the ecological condition of much of its natural land is poor. And those field measurements are now seven or eight growing seasons old.

That makes the water-quality technician I watched at Cedar Lake an interesting comparison.

We would never test the lake in 2019 and simply assume those results still describe its condition in 2026. We test water repeatedly because conditions change, because degradation matters and because measurement tells us whether intervention is working.

Why don’t we approach the ecological health of the land surrounding our lakes with the same regularity?

The threats are not difficult to see. Buckthorn overwhelms a woodland understory. Invasive plants displace native plant communities. Tree regeneration can and in many cases has disappeared. Habitat becomes less diverse. And the condition of soils and vegetation on the surrounding landscape ultimately affects the lakes and wetlands below them.

So where is the terrestrial equivalent of the person I watched taking water samples? Where is the regular ecological monitoring? Where are the established measures that tell us whether a woodland is improving or deteriorating? How do we know if the approach and staffing is commensurate with the acreage and the problem we need to address? And where is the budget that says this problem matters?

What Problem Are We Trying to Solve?
Those questions seem particularly important as the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board considers its Natural Resources staffing for 2027 and beyond.

The Park Board already knows that its Natural Resources staff is working at a daunting scale. Its own 2026 budget says the Natural Resources staff manages more than 400 acres of natural areas including prairies, shorelines, wetlands and woodlands and coordinates revegetation and terrestrial invasive-species control.

The Park Board also established an explicit goal of increasing the acreage of Managed Natural Areas by 120 acres while improving the ecological quality of existing areas. Its Natural Areas performance goal acknowledged something important: achieving the goal would require additional funding.

And the 2026 budget went a step further.

It instructed in its 2026 Adopted Budget for staff to evaluate additional acreage for inclusion as Managed Natural Areas, determine the staffing, workspace and equipment needed to maintain that additional land and, if necessary, make requests for additional resources in the 2027–28 budget.

That raises what seems to me a straightforward question:

What did that evaluation tell us?
Additional positions are now being considered within Natural Resources. But rather than simply expanding the number of Natural Resource Specialists or other field personnel directly engaged in terrestrial ecological restoration, some of the emerging functions appear directed toward horticultural expertise associated with places such as Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden and Bird Sanctuary and Graco Park, along with a future wildlife function whose responsibilities are not yet clearly defined.

Horticultural and wildlife expertise may serve entirely legitimate purposes. Eloise Butler deserves expert care. Graco Park has its own landscape needs. Wildlife management may address important needs that are not being adequately met today.

But that brings me back to a more fundamental question:

What problem are we trying to solve?
If hundreds of acres of public woodland, prairie, wetland and shoreline remain ecologically degraded, and invasive species continue spreading while volunteers struggle to contain them, then shouldn't staffing decisions begin with an explicit assessment of that problem?

How many acres require active management? What condition are they in today? Are they getting better or worse? What staffing level would be required not merely to prevent further deterioration, but actually to improve them? And how does the proposed staffing and budget compare with that need?

Those questions are different from asking whether horticulture or wildlife positions would be useful. Almost any environmental program can make a legitimate case for additional resources.
The harder task of budgeting is establishing priorities among legitimate needs.

Measurement Creates Accountability
Across Minneapolis, volunteers continually remove invasive species and attempt to restore native ecological communities. We are, in a very literal sense, pushing back against the kind of biological disruption that Pollan's phrase caused me to think about while working at Cedar Lake.

The Park Board regularly expresses appreciation for that work. Volunteers receive recognition and encouragement.

But appreciation is not a management strategy.

If invasive plants and ecological degradation exist at a scale beyond what volunteers and current staff can reasonably address, then the institutional response ultimately needs include sustained professional capacity and budgets proportional to the problem.

And that brings me back to the person sampling the lake. Perhaps the most important thing about water-quality monitoring isn't simply that someone collects a bottle of water.

Measurement creates accountability.
Imagine if MPRB routinely assessed and reported to the public the ecological condition of its natural areas using a consistent methodology, perhaps not every year, but on a regular cycle.

We could know whether buckthorn and other invasive species were expanding or retreating. We could measure native plant diversity and tree regeneration. We could identify places that were improving and places slipping backward.

Most importantly, we could connect investment to results.

Inventory the land. Measure its condition. Establish standards. Fund the intervention. Measure it again. Report the results.

That would allow commissioners, staff, volunteers and the public to ask a much more meaningful question than simply how much money was spent:

Did the ecological condition of our public land actually improve?
That is why the Natural Resources staffing discussion is about more than personnel. It is about what we choose to measure, what we choose to notice and, ultimately, what we choose to value.
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Henry David Thoreau famously wrote that “in Wildness is the preservation of the World.” If we believe there is truth in that observation, preserving wildness in our public natural areas requires more than setting land aside and calling it a natural area.

Especially in an urban landscape that has experienced years of degradation and relatively limited management, preservation requires actively addressing the problems we already know exist. It means establishing ecological health as more than an aspiration. It means making it a measurable priority and investing enough to help these places recover.

We already know how to do this with water.

Perhaps it is time to become equally serious about measuring and restoring the land that surrounds it.
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​Readers of ER at Cedar Lake Point Beach may wonder what data centers have to do with ecological restoration. For me, the connection is in the word ecosystem.
We most often use that word to describe natural systems, the relationships among plants, wildlife, water, soil, climate, and the other elements that make a healthy habitat possible. But our communities also function as interconnected systems.
Decisions about energy, water, infrastructure, land use, housing, economic development, and quality of life can create effects well beyond the boundaries of an individual property.
That is what interests me about Minneapolis’ proposed zoning regulations for data centers, which are now open for public input. Data centers may bring real benefits, including reuse of underutilized downtown buildings, expansion of digital infrastructure, additional tax base, and potentially support for businesses that depend upon advanced computing and network connectivity.
At the same time, their demands for electricity, water, cooling, backup power, and other infrastructure can have natural, social, and economic consequences.
The ecological-restoration work I write about here has taught me to ask not only what happens to one plant, one parcel, or one project, but what happens to the system as a whole. That seems like an equally useful question to ask as Minneapolis determines how data centers should fit into the city.
The proposed regulations address several important land-use concerns. They also raise broader questions about whether regulating the physical size of individual facilities adequately addresses their actual intensity, cumulative impacts, and demands on surrounding infrastructure.
With that perspective, I offer the following questions and concerns as part of the public discussion:
Electrical demand and intensity.
The proposed 175,000-square-foot limit on “white space” appears to use physical area as a proxy for the scale of a data center. Yet facilities of similar size can have substantially different electrical demands, particularly as computing and AI equipment become increasingly power-dense. If state law prevents Minneapolis from directly limiting megawatt demand through zoning, what other review process ensures that electrical intensity, grid impacts, and related infrastructure requirements are adequately considered?
Why this matters: A facility could potentially remain within the City’s physical size limit while its electrical demand increases substantially over time.
Cumulative impacts, concentration, and maximum capacity.
The proposal appears primarily to evaluate data centers individually. But several facilities located near one another could collectively create the electricity demand, water consumption, backup-generation capacity, noise, and infrastructure impacts of a much larger facility. Should the City establish a cumulative-impact review that considers existing and approved data centers within a defined geographic area? And, if cumulative impacts are relevant, should the City also define an acceptable maximum capacity or concentration for that area, based on infrastructure capacity, environmental impacts, and compatibility with surrounding uses, rather than allowing additional facilities to be considered indefinitely on an individual basis?
Why this matters: Without considering the capacity of the whole, a series of individually acceptable facilities could eventually produce the equivalent impacts of a much larger data-center complex that the City might never have approved as a single proposal.
Noise at the actual receptor.
Data centers require substantial cooling and mechanical equipment, some of which may be located on rooftops. Noise experienced by residents on upper floors of nearby buildings may be quite different from noise measured at street level or near the property line. Sound analysis should consider the actual location and elevation of affected residential receptors, nighttime conditions, and the cumulative effect of multiple mechanical systems and nearby facilities.
Why this matters: Several individually compliant sources could potentially combine into a persistent background-noise environment that diminishes residential quality of life and undermines the City’s objective of maintaining downtown as a desirable place to live.
What does the 175,000-square-foot limit actually measure?
The proposed limit applies to “white space,” while substantial supporting infrastructure—cooling systems, electrical equipment, batteries, generators, and rooftop equipment—may fall outside that definition. The City should clearly identify what is and is not included in the size calculation and determine whether white-space area alone adequately represents the overall operational scale and impact of a facility.
Why this matters: A nominally limited data center could have a considerably larger operational footprint and impact than its regulated white-space area suggests.
Relationship between the 20-foot interior setback and supporting equipment.
Requiring server rooms to remain at least 20 feet from an exterior wall provides separation from the building perimeter, but it is less clear how this protection relates to rooftop or other supporting equipment located outside the server-room envelope. The ordinance should ensure that its protections cannot be undermined simply because significant operational equipment falls outside the definition of server or white space.
Why this matters: A setback intended to protect surrounding uses may provide limited protection if some of the equipment producing the greatest external impacts is not subject to the same spatial protections.
Infrastructure capacity and responsibility for costs.
Data centers can require substantial electrical, water, sewer, cooling, and emergency-response infrastructure. The City should identify how additional infrastructure requirements will be evaluated and who will bear their costs. Existing residents and businesses should not inadvertently subsidize infrastructure expansion primarily required by unusually intensive users.
Why this matters: Without clear allocation of responsibility, private development demands could result in public infrastructure costs or system constraints that are borne more broadly.
Economic-development benefit.
Data centers may be valuable digital infrastructure, particularly if they support Minneapolis businesses, research institutions, healthcare, financial services, AI, or other emerging industries. But those benefits should be identified rather than assumed. What businesses or industries does Minneapolis expect data-center capacity to support locally, and what permanent employment, tax revenue, building reuse, or other measurable economic benefits are expected?
Why this matters: Minneapolis could otherwise assume significant infrastructure and environmental burdens while much of the economic value created by the computing capacity flows elsewhere.
Public benefit proportional to public impact.
Ultimately, the question should extend beyond whether an individual data center can satisfy individual zoning requirements. Minneapolis should also consider whether the public benefits of data-center development are proportional to their collective demands on electricity, water, infrastructure, land, the environment, and surrounding neighborhoods.
Why this matters: Once substantial infrastructure is committed and a concentration of facilities becomes established, changing course may be considerably more difficult than establishing appropriate limits and expectations at the outset.
Thinking About the Whole
The proposed ordinance necessarily regulates things zoning can readily measure: location, square footage, setbacks, building configuration, and permitted uses. Data centers, however, are unusual because their operational intensity may not correspond closely to their physical size.
That distinction becomes even more important when multiple facilities are considered together. A limit on the size of each facility does not necessarily establish a limit on the total intensity of data-center development within an area.
That brings me back to the ecological perspective. We know in natural-area restoration that looking at individual elements in isolation can obscure what is happening to the larger system. The same principle seems relevant here. Electricity, water, infrastructure, businesses, housing, residents, public finances, and the environment interact. An impact that appears manageable when considered one facility at a time may look quite different when considered cumulatively.
Before adopting these regulations, Minneapolis should be confident that its framework answers a larger question:
Does the ordinance adequately address the intensity, cumulative impacts, and maximum appropriate concentration of data centers—not simply the physical size and impacts of each individual facility?
The purpose of asking these questions is not to argue that data centers should not be in Minneapolis. They may become important infrastructure for the city’s future. Rather, this is an opportunity to establish thoughtful rules before their scale and concentration are determined by individual development decisions.
If we are going to think about data centers as part of Minneapolis’ future, we should think about the whole ecosystem—natural, social, and economic—and establish what a healthy balance looks like while we still have the opportunity to do so.

Today, thankfully, it is raining.It’s a welcome rain, not a passing shower or a sudden downpour. It’s the kind of long, steady rain that seems prepared to stay for the day. After our stretch of hot, dry weather, it is hard not to celebrate it. The ground is receiving a slow soaking. The air has cooled, and it feels like we’re a bit safer again.

A rainy day can feel like a pause in restoration work. I know I had planned to get out there and put in another few hours today. But instead, it’s a day to stay inside, read, and reflect a bit on what’s going on out there.

And in doing so, I am reassured that the restoration has not stopped. The work already completed is helping determine what happens to this rain. Where dense stands of Buckthorn have been reduced, fewer invasive leaves and roots are competing for water, sunlight, nutrients, and growing space. Native plants have a better opportunity to benefit from the rain entering the soil.

The forest is making use of yesterday’s work.

What Rain Gives the Forest
Rain is more than water falling from the sky. It is one of the ways an ecosystem feeds itself.
When rain reaches the forest, some is caught by leaves and branches. Some evaporates. Some moves across the surface into low areas, wetlands, and streams. Some filters into the soil, where it becomes available to plant roots and the vast community of organisms living underground.

Plants absorb water primarily through their roots. That water helps keep leaves and stems firm, carries dissolved minerals from the soil, and transports materials throughout the plant. It is also part of photosynthesis, although much of the water a plant absorbs is eventually released through tiny openings in its leaves during “transpiration.” I learned a bit more about that word today. That process cools the plant and helps draw more water and nutrients upward from the soil.

Rain also stimulates life that we rarely see. Fungi, bacteria, insects, worms, and other decomposers become active in moist soil. Their work breaks down organic matter, releases nutrients, builds soil structure, and supports the relationships upon which plants depend.

Some water remains near the surface, where grasses, wildflowers, seedlings, and shallow-rooted shrubs can reach it. Some penetrates farther into the ground, replenishing deeper soil moisture and, under the right conditions, contributing to groundwater.

How much of the rain becomes useful to the ecosystem depends on what it encounters. A slow, steady rain generally has more opportunity to soak into the soil than the same amount of water delivered in a brief downpour. Healthy soil, fallen leaves, roots, and varied vegetation help slow the water and hold it within the landscape. Compacted soil and bare ground may shed water more quickly, allowing it to carry soil and nutrients away.

The plants already occupying the site matter, too.

Rain Enters a Living Competition
Rain does not fall on a forest and become equally available to everything growing there. It enters a living competition. Before water can soak deeply into the soil, it passes through an  upper layer crowded with roots. Each plant captures what it can. And when invasive species are unnaturally abundant, they can claim a disproportionate share of the resources passing through the ecosystem.

This is part of the problem with Buckthorn. Buckthorn frequently forms dense thickets with extensive roots concentrated in the upper soil. While I appreciate that those shallow root systems without a taproot make Buckthorn easier to pull, those roots are well positioned to capture moisture from smaller rains before it moves deeper into the soil.

At Cedar Lake Point Beach, that competition may add to the stresses experienced by mature trees and emerging seedlings, particularly during hot, dry periods. Buckthorn also leafs out early in spring and retains its leaves late into autumn, giving it a longer season in which to collect sunlight, grow, and draw water from the ground.

One Buckthorn plant may not consume an extraordinary amount of water. The larger concern is the cumulative effect of hundreds or thousands of shrubs occupying the same woodland. Together, they create persistent demand for water, light, nutrients, and space.

Water is only part of that competition. Buckthorn also occupies physical space, alters growing conditions, and casts dense shade. Its presence makes it harder for native plants to become established and harder for a forest to produce the next generation of canopy trees.

That means removing Buckthorn does more than eliminate an unwanted plant. It reduces a persistent demand on the woodland’s limited resources.

Restoration Creates Opportunity
By reducing invasive vegetation in our restoration work, we reduce some of the barriers preventing a natural community from receiving and using its resources well. Fewer Buckthorn and other dominant invasives, such as White Mulberry, mean less shade over the forest floor. Fewer living roots mean less belowground competition. Fewer fruit-bearing plants mean fewer seeds available to create the next generation of invasion.

The openings we create give native plants a better chance to respond. Rain can reach the soil beneath those openings. Sunlight can find emerging leaves. Native roots can occupy newly available space. Seedlings that have been waiting, or plants that we intentionally return to the site, have a better chance to survive.

Removal alone does not instantly produce a healthy woodland. A space left open can be occupied again by Buckthorn, White Mulberry, or another invasive species. Long-term recovery may require repeated follow-up, protection of young native plants from hungry deer and other animals, and the return of native grasses, sedges, wildflowers, shrubs, and trees.

Even so, the benefits do not begin only when the restoration is complete. They begin as soon as the native plants face less competition.

Progress Is Part of the Restoration
We tend to picture restoration as a dramatic before-and-after transformation: first, a woodland choked with Buckthorn; then, an open forest floor filled with native plants.

Most restoration does not happen that way. It progresses hour by hour and step by step. One section is opened while another remains dense. Cut stumps send up new growth. Seedlings appear where mature plants once stood. Brush piles grow faster than the restored plant community beneath them.

It can be difficult to look at an unfinished project and recognize success. Our attention naturally goes to the Buckthorn that remains rather than the Buckthorn that is gone.

But a project does not need to be finished before it begins to do good. Every Buckthorn cut back has fewer leaves capturing sunlight and releasing water through transpiration. Every root system weakened has less stored energy available for growth and reproduction. Every fruit-bearing invasive plant removed represents fewer seeds. Every small opening gives rain, light, nutrients, and space another opportunity to support native life.

A weakened invasion is less damaging than an unchecked one. A smaller thicket places less pressure on a woodland than a larger one. An area partially cleared offers more opportunity than an area never touched.

Cut, Shuck, Pluck, and Huck
I describe the process as “cut, shuck, pluck, and huck” in a way I think people can visualize. Cut the trunks and stems. Shuck the resprouted branches. Pluck the plant by the roots. Huck the remains onto a designated pile for later disposal.

It is a memorable name for physical and repetitive work, but it also describes something ecologically meaningful. Each action takes away part of the invasive plant’s capacity to dominate the site.

Parts of this process reflect what Minnesota land managers call “critical period cutting,” also known as the high-cut or high-stump method. University of Minnesota researchers continue to study how the timing and frequency of repeated cutting can weaken Buckthorn and support long-term restoration.

The approach involves cutting Buckthorn while leaving a visible length of trunk, then returning to remove the new leaves, branches, and stems that the plant produces. The first cut may not kill the Buckthorn. It does, however, take away the leaves through which the plant collects energy. Buckthorn responds by drawing on energy stored in its roots to produce new growth. When that regrowth is removed at the appropriate time, the plant loses both its new leaves and some of the energy it spent creating them.

The Buckthorn may still be standing. Its roots may still be alive. New shoots may still appear.
But its capacity and impact have been weakened. Repeated cutting requires persistence. It is not a single dramatic act of eradication. It is a process of steadily reducing the plant’s capacity to recover until it can no longer maintain itself.

That makes each return to the site part of the restoration.

The Value of an Unfinished Day
On a rainy day like today, we are reminded that ecological recovery does not happen only while our hands are on the tools. Rain continues the work in ways we cannot. It enters the soil, awakens microorganisms, moves nutrients, cools leaves, fills roots, and supports plants throughout the landscape. Our role is not to control that entire system. Our role is to help remove some of what prevents the system from functioning well.

Today’s rain is falling on places where Buckthorn still stands. It is also falling on places where Buckthorn has been cut, weakened, pulled, or removed. It is reaching native plants that have more room because someone cleared a patch last week, last month, or last year. That work retains its value even when the entire site has not been restored.

So those who perform ecological restoration can take pleasure in the patch that’s been cleared, even while Buckthorn remains beyond it. We can take satisfaction in the trunks and stems already cut, even knowing that we will return to cut the regrowth. Notice what has changed, not only what remains to be done.

Good work is not the enemy of a great restoration. It is how a great restoration comes into being.

Every cut reduces competition. Every opening creates possibility. Every return builds upon the work that came before. And today, while the tools are put away and the rain falls steadily, the forest is already benefiting from our progress.
​
The forest begins benefiting before we finish.

Today was go time. After a few weeks of discussion, planning, making plant and site selections, picking up plants, and scheduling time together, our mini-team of Brian, Jen, and I got together  at 7am to for about 3-1/2 hours perform this litoral edge planting on Cedar Lake Point Beach. 

First of all, a special thanks to Brian for conjuring up the plan. He kept saying, "What about this, and that," I mostly said, "Great! Sure! Let's!" And thanks to Keith at the Cedar Lake Park Association who responded to the plan not only with financial support in purchasing the plants, but with encouragement and hope. 

I wrote about life's dynamics at the litoral edge in a previous blog post. And today was about applying a thoughtful application of knowledge to action. All together, we planted 122 plants in an approximately 6' wide by about 10' deep project area. Five plant species were planted in essentially rows, each associated and suited to these kind of micro site conditions. That was the plan, on this steeply graded area that included: 

• 32 - 3" Sprengel's Sedge (Carex sprengelii) - for the Upland edge. It's a woodland sedge that prefers mesic to dry-mesic soils. It is the natural upper edge of the planting that abuts the gravel trail
• 18 - 4" Woolgrass (Scirpus cyperinus) - for moist but occasionally flooded soil conditions. This one thrives in moist soils and tolerates periodic flooding but is happiest slightly upslope from permanent saturation. Its heigh also creates a nice visual transition.
• 18 - 4" Blue Flag Iris (Iris versicolor) - fot wet meadows. Likes consistently moist soil but performs best with its crown slightly above prolonged flooding. Provides showy flowers. This was was a no brainer given we've seen these irises pop up along the shoreline since our restoration work cleared are for it to return naturally.
• 18 - 4" Green Bullrush (Scirpus atrovirens) - for the saturated shoreline. This is an excellent transition species for wet soils just above standing water. It has a strong root system for stabilization.
• 36 - 4" Lake Sedge (Carex Iacustris) - for frequently submerged/water's edge. This grows in shallow water and saturated soils. The root system grows into the shoreline serving as a great filter to help create a cleaner lake. 

In the end, we had more plants that we could fit into the compact 6' x 10' project area, So, as we got into the water's edge side we softened the edge and expanded it as appropriate. 

Protecting the Project Area
A forturtuate aspect of this site is that by virtue of being a part of a peninsula, a virtual bay protects the shoreline from heavy waves that can disturb litoral edge plantings. 

This shoreline also being a popular fishing spot, we selected a portion that is pretty hard to access. But just in case, we piled deadwood at its ends and waterfront edges to help delineate it. We also posted some temporary posts with strings and a Volunteers Working restoration sign to identify it. A more resilient fencing will be installed in the coming week. We need to protect it from people, wildlife, and pets. Incidentally, I was talking with an interested neighbor about the project before we began. Her dog started chewing on the unplanted grasses and we both realized, wow, this area is tasty and does need protection.

An always fun part of the project work are how many people running, walking, and biking along take a moment to thank us for the work. I had a nice conversation with a fisher, discussing how we need to block off areas for their access but it is in the interest creating cleaner lake and fishing conditions. He was very grateful, saying he's fished this are since he was 8 years old and now at 38, he treasures this area. At some time, we will want to have more conversations with those who fish the lake, gaining more of their support to clean up their lines, hooks and waste. While that topic is for another time, we hope that any and all of those who use this lake appreciate how we need to all protect it if we want to keep it for future generations. 

For this project, protecting it will mean keeping it watered and monitoring its progress. Hopefully it might become a model that we can repeat around the whole peninsula and perhaps lake with modifications as needed by specific site conditions. 

I really really like removing Buckthorn and invasives, with the gratification in knowing ridding an area of toxic cancerous nasty stuff. But today in planting anew, especially with a sense of intent and with family and friends, it sure was a fun feeling with such an incredible sense hope. 

Yesterday, I was out doing some light stewardship work at Cedar Lake Point Beach. With temperatures climbing this week and next, I find myself planning how much I can realistically accomplish before the heat takes over.

Days like these are also a reminder that our urban forests are doing an enormous amount of work for us. Healthy trees shade our parks, cool our neighborhoods, store carbon, support wildlife, and make our city more resilient to a warming climate. There is no denying that climate change is taking place, and while each of us looks for ways to help, one of the most effective tools we already have is all around us: healthy natural areas.

That raises a question I’ve been thinking about. If healthy woodlands are one of our best natural climate tools, shouldn’t restoring them be considered climate action?

Unlike many climate solutions that require people to change their daily habits, restoring healthy forests allows nature to do what it has evolved to do. Healthy woodlands cool the landscape, absorb carbon, protect biodiversity, improve water quality, and become more resilient over time. Rather than replacing other efforts, ecological restoration should be viewed as working alongside them.

Within the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board, two departments have the ability to influence the health of our urban forests. The Natural Resources department directly restores ecological systems but has the funding to actively manage only about one-third of the park system’s roughly 1,200 acres of natural areas. Forestry, funded at roughly ten times that level, focuses primarily on maintaining the urban tree canopy by removing hazardous trees and planting new ones. Both play important roles, but together they also represent an opportunity.

I was pleased to see Forestry crews working on the Cedar Lake Point Beach peninsula yesterday, removing most of the eleven elm trees that had been marked for removal. I still need to confirm this with Forestry staff, but I assume these trees were removed because they had died and posed a safety risk to visitors. Protecting people from falling trees is, of course, an important responsibility.

But while watching their work, I couldn’t help noticing something else.

Most of those dead elms stood within a woodland that is becoming increasingly dominated by White Mulberry. Unlike the native cottonwoods, basswoods, hackberries, and other trees trying to regenerate in this space, White Mulberry spreads aggressively, shades out native seedlings, and gradually changes the character of the woodland. In many places it is becoming the next major ecological threat.

Seven years ago, Buckthorn was our greatest concern. Thanks to thousands of volunteer hours contributed by Park Stewards across Minneapolis, that threat is steadily being reduced. Here at Cedar Lake Point Beach, after seven years of persistent work, Buckthorn no longer defines the woodland the way it once did.

White Mulberry, however, presents a different challenge.

These trees have grown too large for volunteers to address under our stewardship agreements. Believe me, I’d happily tackle them with a hand saw if I were allowed. But appropriately, those decisions belong to trained professionals with the right equipment and expertise.

That brings me back to Forestry.

If Forestry has the skills, equipment, and capacity to remove invasive White Mulberry while creating the conditions that allow native trees to recover, perhaps this is an investment worth making. If additional resources are needed, perhaps restoring degraded woodlands deserves to be viewed not simply as park maintenance, but as climate resilience.

The potential is already there. These woodlands want to regenerate. Nature already knows how to heal itself when given the opportunity. Sometimes it simply needs our help removing the barriers we’ve created.

Healthy natural areas are more than beautiful places to walk. They are living infrastructure. They cool our city, support wildlife, strengthen biodiversity, and quietly help us meet the environmental challenges ahead.

If we truly believe healthy ecosystems are part of the solution to climate change, then helping them become healthy again may be one of the smartest investments we can make.

​This morning’s dog walk had to be an early one. The oncoming heat wave means our 95-pound Ted needs to get his exercise before the sun begins to bake. It’s hard to complain about the weather here in Minneapolis when the news is filled with stories of extreme heat, earthquakes and other disasters around the world. I never take for granted the gentle breeze coming off Cedar Lake or the welcome shade of our remarkable tree canopy.


The Minneapolis Park & Recreation Board staff were out early too. That’s nothing unusual. Our Park Keepers are almost always out by 7 a.m., emptying trash cans and making their daily rounds. This morning, though, I happened to run into one of the Forestry Department arborists at Cedar Lake Point Beach. We’d met before, so it was a good opportunity to catch up while he was taking inventory and marking trees for removal.


He explained that elms are their primary focus right now and that eleven had been marked for removal. Looking at a freshly cut branch, he showed me the dark brown streaking inside the wood—evidence of Dutch elm disease. Once the disease reaches that stage, the tree is beyond saving.

​I admitted that, until he pointed them out, I had barely noticed how far gone those trees really were. Their crowns were almost completely bare. Seeing them through his eyes reminded me that removing them wouldn’t diminish our precious canopy. They were no longer providing much of one.


Before leaving, I thanked him for his work. He smiled and thanked me in return, saying how much he appreciated the efforts of Park Stewards across the city. Then he said something that meant a great deal to me.


“I’ve been working this area for 21 years,” he said, “and I’ve never seen Cedar Lake Point Beach look better.”


Those few words made a lot of volunteer hours feel worthwhile.

One of the things I’ve learned from ecological restoration is that we care for what we feel connected to.

The volunteers who show up year after year to remove buckthorn, collect seeds, plant native species, pick up trash, and care for our parks are not doing so because we own these places.

We do it because we love them. We feel connected to them. We feel responsible for them. We want future generations to experience them.

The same is true of youth coaches who spend evenings on athletic fields, neighborhood volunteers who serve on boards and committees, citizen scientists who monitor wildlife, and countless others who contribute their time and energy to public spaces.

That connection may be one of the most valuable assets any park system possesses. When we feel connected, we care. We invest. We advocate. We show up.

Over the past several months, while not hacking away at buckthorn on Cedar Lake Point Beach, I’ve also been following Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board decisions since the new commissioners took office in January. Part of that interest comes from trying to understand where ecological restoration and natural areas fit among the many issues competing for the Board’s attention. Part of it comes from my role covering Park Board issues for the Hill & Lake Press.

As I’ve watched a series of resolutions move through the process, one recurring question keeps surfacing:

What does meaningful community engagement actually look like?

It is a phrase frequently used in public meetings, planning documents, and political campaigns. Yet recent Park Board decisions suggest that people may have very different definitions of what it means.

For some, meaningful community engagement means inviting the public into a genuine conversation. It means listening before conclusions are reached. It means allowing residents to help define both the problem and the potential solutions. It means acknowledging disagreement, considering compromises, and remaining open to changing course based on what is learned.

For others, community engagement appears to mean informing the public about a decision that has largely already been made and then seeking input on implementation details.

The difference is significant.

It is the difference between asking someone to help design a house and asking them where they would like the furniture placed after the house has already been built.

This tension has appeared in several recent Park Board discussions, including Open Streets, The Mall, and the decommissioning of the Minnehaha dog park. In each case, many community members, park users, and nearby residents were left with the impression that the fundamental direction had already been been determined before broader public discussion occurred.

In the case of The Mall, many residents came away feeling that the structure of the public process emphasized evidence of support while giving less weight to those most directly affected by the proposal. In the case of the Minnehaha dog park, significant staff time was devoted to documenting the reasons for closure. Some users of the park have questioned whether an equivalent effort was made to understand the impacts on those who used and cared for the site.

Part of the challenge is that not all voices enter the process equally.

Those who are organized, focused, well-funded, and experienced in advocacy often have an advantage. They know how government works. They know how to mobilize supporters. They know how to frame issues and sustain pressure over time.

Most residents or users of parks do not.

Most people have jobs, families, and responsibilities that leave little time to follow government proceedings. They often become aware of an issue only after a proposal has already taken shape. At that point, they are no longer helping define the agenda. They are reacting to it.

As the saying goes, if you’re not sitting at the table, you’re probably on the menu.

This raises an important question for elected officials. Campaigns are built around priorities, values, and promises. Voters expect candidates to have opinions and advocate for change. But governance is different from campaigning.

Once elected, does governance mean advancing a predetermined agenda? Or does it mean creating a process through which the community can collectively determine priorities and solutions?

The answer matters because public trust depends on it.

When residents believe decisions are being driven primarily by one set of stakeholders, one ideology, or one organized constituency, trust erodes—even among people who may ultimately agree with the outcome.

The issue is not whether public officials should lead. They should.

The issue is whether leadership includes a willingness to genuinely listen, adapt, and acknowledge competing viewpoints before major decisions are made.

And perhaps this is where ecological restoration offers an unexpected lesson.

The success of our natural areas depends heavily on volunteers. The same can be said of youth athletics, neighborhood organizations, advisory committees, and many other parts of civic life. These systems function because people willingly contribute their time, energy, knowledge, and care.

That willingness is rooted in connection. We support what we help create. We care for what we feel connected to.

When we are invited into a process early enough to help define the problem and explore solutions, we become participants in the outcome. Even if we don’t get everything we want, we often retain a sense of commitment because we helped shape the conversation.

When we are asked only to comment on implementation details after a direction has already been chosen, the relationship can feel different. We are no longer helping create. We are reacting.

And that matters because connection, once weakened, is difficult to rebuild. Meaningful community engagement requires more than a few public hearings at the end of a process.

It requires clear communication about the issue being addressed and why it matters. It requires media coverage that helps residents understand what is under consideration. It requires opportunities for people to organize around competing ideas. It requires transparency about who is being consulted, what input is being received, and how that input influences decisions.

Most importantly, it requires involving the public early enough that we can help shape the conversation rather than merely respond to it.

None of this is easy.

Historically, many groups have been excluded from decision-making processes. Expanding participation and elevating previously unheard voices is both necessary and overdue. But meaningful engagement cannot simply become a transfer of influence from one group to another. It needs to include a process in which multiple perspectives can be heard and weighed openly.

Democracy is messy. Consensus is rare. Not everyone will get what they want. But people are more likely to accept outcomes when they believe the process was fair, transparent, and genuinely open to influence.

Perhaps meaningful community engagement is not ultimately about gathering input.

Perhaps it is about strengthening the connection between people and the places we care about.

Our parks are stronger when we feel a sense of stewardship toward them. The challenge for any public institution is not simply making decisions. It is maintaining the relationships that inspire us to care enough to show up long after the meeting is over.

Because in the end, the most valuable resource in our parks may not be the land itself. It may be the people who love them enough to care for them.

If you’re not already a follower or subscriber of this blog, chances are you arrived here by scanning one of the QR codes posted near a restoration project site.

If so, welcome.

Feel free to look around. The banner at the top explains the who, what, and why behind this work. Along the right side, you’ll find a collection of blog posts dating back to October 2022. Some focus on the practical side of ecological restoration, including tools, techniques, and project updates. Others explore broader topics such as park board policies, stewardship, and the many thoughts and observations that arise from spending time in these places.

Most of all, I hope you’ll join in the shared experience of simply being present in nature, whatever that means to you. The connection between people and the living world around us is real, yet it can be easy to lose sight of it when the virtual world occupies so much of our attention.

These natural places offer something increasingly rare: a chance to slow down, clear the mind, and reconnect with something larger than ourselves. And often, it is within that quiet space that we begin to recognize just how important these places are, and why they are worth protecting for future generations.

You're invited to stop back at your leisure, or perhaps email me to get on the email list or follow on Substack. 

Thanks for stopping by, and I hope to see you on the trail.

The Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board is exploring new revenue opportunities. That’s understandable. Costs continue to rise, infrastructure ages, and every public agency faces the challenge of maintaining services while stretching limited resources. As these conversations unfold, ideas such as sponsorships, advertising, and even naming rights occasionally enter the discussion.While those approaches may generate revenue, they also come with tradeoffs. Public parks occupy a unique place in our communities. They belong to all of us, and part of their value comes from their identity as public spaces rather than commercial ones. Once a public place becomes associated with a corporate identity, it can be difficult to reverse course. Before we go down that path, perhaps we should take a closer look at something we already possess.

The Minneapolis Park system is itself a remarkable brand, or perhaps more accurately, hundreds of brands.

In fact, the Park Board may have one of the most diverse portfolios of place-based identities in the country. With more than 185 neighborhood parks, 22 lakes, dozens of regional destinations, beaches, trails, parkways, waterways, golf courses, and natural areas, Minneapolis has an extraordinary collection of places that people identify with and care about. Every lake, parkway, regional park, neighborhood park, beach, trail, and natural area has its own character and its own following. People develop attachments to places. They build memories there. They identify with them. They return to them year after year. That connection is valuable, and not just financially.

I first became aware of the New York City Parks brand years ago when my son was living in New York. One day I noticed him wearing a simple hat with the NYC Parks leaf logo on it. I remember thinking how effective it was. It wasn’t flashy. It wasn’t commercial. It simply represented a public park system that people felt connected to. I liked it because of its simplicity, and because it seemed to capture a sense of identity without trying too hard. They have a whole merchandise store.

I’ve noticed something similar in my own travels. I like collecting stickers from places I’ve visited. Some end up on my Nalgene bottle. Others find their way onto the basement wall. Every one of them tells a story. Looking at them brings back memories of a particular hike, a favorite destination, a family trip, or a place that left an impression. Many people do the same thing. Others collect hats, T-shirts, patches, pins, or other memorabilia. National Parks have built an entire culture around this idea. So have museums, bike shops, ski areas, breweries, and all kinds of local destinations.

In fact, for me, it’s often the more obscure places that are the most interesting. Anyone can buy a shirt from a famous destination. What I enjoy finding is the sticker from a small museum, the hat from a local bike shop, or the shirt from a place that only locals might recognize. Those items feel more personal because they tell a more specific story about where you’ve been and what you’ve experienced. In some ways, neighborhood parks could work the same way. While visitors might gravitate toward places like Lake Harriet or Minnehaha Falls, local residents might be just as excited to find merchandise representing the neighborhood park they walk through every day.

The Minneapolis Park system is filled with places that inspire exactly that kind of connection.
Places like Lake Harriet, Bde Maka Ska, Cedar Lake, Theodore Wirth, Minnehaha Falls, Powderhorn Park, Loring Park, Webber Park, Boom Island, and countless others all have their own identity and sense of place. They are more than facilities on a map. They are destinations with stories, memories, and loyal users.

What if, instead of looking outward for a corporate brand to attach to our parks, we looked inward at the places people already love?

Imagine a thoughtfully designed merchandise program built around the parks themselves. Not flashy. Not overly commercialized. Just a consistent family of designs that celebrates the uniqueness of each place while reinforcing the broader Minneapolis Parks identity. A Cedar Lake collection. A Lake Harriet collection. A Theodore Wirth collection. Neighborhood park collections. Stickers, hats, shirts, patches, prints, and other items designed with enough consistency to feel connected while allowing each destination to maintain its own character.
The audiences could be surprisingly diverse. Visitors could take home a reminder of places they explored. Residents could show pride in the parks that help define their neighborhoods. Collectors could gradually build a collection representing different parts of the city, much like people do with National Parks, ski areas, baseball stadiums, or breweries. The appeal would not be the merchandise itself. The appeal would be the connection to place.

Other park systems have already explored this concept. New York City Parks operates a merchandise store built around its iconic leaf logo and park identity. More interestingly, a report examining alternative revenue opportunities for New York City’s park system concluded that the agency was significantly underutilizing the value of its brand. The report pointed to the strong public recognition of NYC Parks and suggested that expanded merchandising and licensing represented a largely untapped opportunity.

Examples from elsewhere suggest there may be real potential. The Central Park Conservancy reported merchandise revenues exceeding $1 million annually. Friends of the High Line generated nearly half a million dollars through merchandise sales, while Seattle’s park branding and merchandise efforts generated more than $160,000 in annual revenue. None of these programs solve a park system’s budget challenges on their own, but they demonstrate that people are willing to purchase products connected to places they value.

What makes Minneapolis particularly interesting is the breadth of destinations available. Unlike many park systems that rely on a handful of iconic locations, Minneapolis has an extensive collection of neighborhood parks, lakes, trails, parkways, beaches, and regional destinations that each carry their own identity. The opportunity may not lie in creating a single Minneapolis Parks product line, but rather in creating a family of place-based products that allow people to connect with the specific destinations that matter to them.

We often talk about parks as assets that require funding. Perhaps we should also recognize that the places themselves have value. Not value to be exploited, but value to be celebrated. A thoughtfully designed merchandise program would not simply create another revenue stream. It would reinforce the stories, memories, and sense of place that already exist throughout the park system.

The goal would not be to commercialize the parks. Quite the opposite. Done thoughtfully, such a program could strengthen the relationship people already have with them. It could celebrate neighborhood identity, encourage exploration, build pride, and generate revenue at the same time. The key would be restraint. Keep the designs clean. Keep the focus on place. Protect the integrity of the Minneapolis Parks brand rather than diluting it.
Would it solve every budget challenge? Of course not. But it seems worth asking whether there is untapped value in the identity, pride, and sense of place that already exists throughout the Minneapolis Park system.

Before we start selling naming rights, perhaps we should first celebrate the places that already have value.

I don’t know. What do you think?

It’s June. Already.I always have a mixed reaction to what feels like the official start of summer. How can our natural areas transform almost overnight from first bloom to lush, dense growth?
Just a few weeks ago, we were cutting up blown-over trees and stacking them for removal. Today, many of those same trunks are nearly concealed beneath grape vines and a fresh flush of buckthorn, green ash, burdock, and countless other plants. The young trees planted over the years still sit inside their protective mesh cylinders, looking almost sparse amidst the explosion of growth surrounding them.

Frankly, it can feel a bit overwhelming. At times, it creates that familiar feeling of one step forward and two steps back.

Scanning the Landscape
This is the time of year when it becomes important to step back and take stock.
Up close, all I see is regrowth. Resprouting buckthorn. Grapevines reaching over brush piles. A seemingly endless list of tasks waiting to be done. But viewed across the landscape, a different picture emerges.

Light now reaches places that were once dark and choked with invasive growth. Sight lines have opened. Native plants are returning. The habitat is becoming healthier and more diverse.
On May 15, I pulled out my Merlin bird app and recorded for just three minutes. It identified 18 different bird species. That was a good reminder. This place is becoming a more welcoming habitat for wildlife.

Progress is happening, even if it isn’t always obvious when standing in the middle of the work.
It is also a time to assess the landscape and set priorities for the season ahead. The answer is not to do everything. The answer is to know what comes next.

What’s Next
After taking stock, I’ve settled on three priorities for the coming months.

1. Move the Deadwood Out
A tremendous amount of buckthorn and other woody debris has been removed from the interior of the peninsula over the past several years. Much of it has been piled along trails and access points, waiting for the next step.

Now comes the “hucking” stage.

The goal is to move those piles to locations where Park Board staff can more easily collect and dispose of them. Last year, staff saw the size of one particularly large pile and hauled it away. Hopefully we can create similar opportunities this season.

Removing those piles will help complete an important phase of the restoration process and make the area feel more welcoming and accessible.

2. Protect the Young Plantings
The second priority is caring for the trees and shrubs that have already been planted.
That means watering them during dry periods, even when it requires carrying buckets of lake water into the interior. It means clearing aggressive plants that may try to overwhelm them. It means repairing protective cylinders damaged by deer that enjoy nibbling off tender new growth.

It may also mean adding signs or markers to remind visitors that some of these small seedlings represent years of planning and effort, and that they need a little space to get established.

The future canopy begins with these small and often overlooked plants.

3. Continue the Shucking
The work of shucking, removing the new growth that sprouts from cut buckthorn trunks, will continue. This season we’ll return to the northern shoreline of the peninsula, the very place where this restoration effort began six and a half years ago.

There’s something fitting about returning to the beginning. The work is never truly finished. Areas that once looked restored always require revisiting. New growth appears. New challenges emerge. Stewardship requires persistence.

Stewardship Is a Practice of Persistent Care
Sometimes it’s easy to ask when this work will finally be done. But every spring offers the same reminder: living nature is dynamic.

Living systems are never finished. Every season brings new growth, new challenges, and new opportunities. Stewardship is not about reaching an endpoint. It is about showing up, assessing conditions, setting priorities, and moving forward despite the scale of the task.

Every spring the green tide returns. It can feel overwhelming if I focus only on everything that still needs to be done. But when I step back, I can see how far this place has come. And when I zoom in, I can see what comes next. Sometimes stewardship is simply the discipline of choosing the next patch of ground and getting to work.

Climate Change is Increasingly Driving Local Decisions
In recent conversations surrounding the closure of portions of streets for additional greenspace, one phrase keeps surfacing: climate change.
The logic seems fairly straightforward. Reduce space for cars, encourage walking and biking, lower vehicle miles traveled, reduce emissions, and help the climate. And perhaps in some ways that works.

But the more I hear the conversation unfold around projects like Hennepin Avenue and Lyndale Avenue, the more I find myself asking a broader question: Are we measuring the right things?
A great deal of today’s urban climate thinking has been influenced by European transportation models focused heavily on reducing vehicle miles traveled, often referred to as VMT. Reduce lanes. Slow traffic. Remove parking. Encourage density and transit use. Eventually fewer people drive.

In theory, fewer vehicle miles traveled should mean lower emissions. But there is also a great deal of uncertainty buried inside those assumptions.

The Uncertainty Inside Transportation Assumptions
How much traffic actually disappears versus simply reroutes elsewhere? How much congestion and idling increase in adjacent corridors? How much additional circling, longer routing, or diversion onto neighborhood streets occurs? What are the long-term impacts on commercial corridors and access? How much mode shift realistically occurs in a city with Minneapolis’ climate, geography, and transportation patterns?

These are incredibly complicated systems.

And while transportation redesigns have become increasingly popular culturally and politically, popularity is not the same thing as long-term scientific proof of net climate effectiveness across entire urban systems.

That does not mean these projects are wrong. Many may improve safety, walkability, transit access, or quality of life. Some may indeed reduce emissions over time. But much of the climate argument still relies heavily on predictive modeling of future human behavior.

At the same time, we already possess decades of scientific understanding about the measurable environmental benefits of healthy ecological systems themselves. And at best, that conversation often feels secondary.

The Missing Climate Conversation
I sometimes wonder if we have become so focused on measuring transportation behavior that we have largely failed to consider the ecological performance of the natural systems already sitting right in front of us.

Let’s look at our park system’s natural areas. It contains roughly 665 acres of dry mesic forest, mesic forest, and altered woodland systems. These are the places where biodiversity can thrive and where climate change can be impacted. Unfortunately, according to ecological assessments, most of this land currently functions in degraded condition due to invasive species, fragmentation, poor regeneration, and long-term ecological stress.

A woodland can still look green while functioning far below its ecological potential.

Recently I also learned about something called Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG), now being used in England as part of development policy. The basic idea is simple: development projects should leave biodiversity in a measurably better condition than before.

Whatever one thinks about the policy itself, the underlying premise is important: biodiversity and ecological function are increasingly being treated as measurable climate infrastructure.
That’s significant and confirms ecological restoration is not simply aesthetic landscaping. It is performance improvement for living systems.

Healthy Ecosystems as Climate Infrastructure
Research from the University of Minnesota shows that healthy woodlands continuously store carbon while also cooling urban temperatures, absorbing stormwater, stabilizing soils, filtering pollutants, and supporting biodiversity. The University of Minnesota Extension has estimated that Minnesota forests store roughly 75 tons of carbon per acre on average, while the Minnesota DNR has identified forests as one of the state’s few net carbon-offsetting systems.

These are not speculative behavioral models. These are measurable ecological functions.

And unlike many transportation interventions, healthy ecosystems continue performing whether or not human behavior changes perfectly. They cool cities. They absorb stormwater. They stabilize soils. They support biodiversity. They store carbon. And they improve resilience.

What Restoration Might Mean
To illustrate the possible scale, I ran some figures that may not pass academic rigor and peer review but were pulled together from different sources try to offer some context. Woodlands essentially offset carbon emissions equivalent to removing between 1,000 to 5,000 vehicles miles traveled per acre. Given the substandard condition of these woodlands, let’s assume they are performing at 50 percent or 500 vehicle miles traveled per acre annually. Minneapolis’ 665 acres of degraded woodlands would therefore equal about 332,500 VMT per year, or roughly 22 average vehicles.

Now imagine those same woodland systems restored toward healthier ecological function through invasive removal, native regeneration, soil recovery, and long-term stewardship. If their climate performance increased toward the top end of the range of 5,000 VMT per acre annually, the result would approach 3.3 million VMT annually, or roughly 222 vehicles.

These are not measured Minneapolis outcomes per se but application of assumptions to scientifically determined ranges. They are scenario estimates intended to illustrate scale.
But even as illustrative comparisons, they suggest something important: Improving ecological performance across existing natural areas could potentially increase climate benefit dramatically without requiring massive behavioral change from the public.

Healthy ecosystems are already functioning climate infrastructure. The question is whether we are investing seriously enough in their performance.

To be fair, the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board does not directly control most street reconstruction projects. Those are primarily city and county transportation decisions. At the same time, Park Board leadership and several commissioners have increasingly supported transportation-related climate initiatives, including recent resolutions connected to “Open Parkways” and broader street redesign efforts intended to reduce automobile dependence and encourage alternative transportation modes.

That makes the larger question worth asking:
If local governments are increasingly aligning around climate-focused transportation policy, should there not also be a comparable level of urgency, visibility, and investment directed toward improving the ecological performance of the city’s own natural systems?

The Funding Imbalance
And this is where the imbalance becomes difficult to ignore.

The South Hennepin Avenue redesign is estimated in roughly the $32–36 million range. The proposed Lyndale Avenue redesign is likely to cost tens of millions more.

Meanwhile, the Minneapolis Park & Recreation Board’s Natural Resources department — responsible for roughly 1,200 acres of woodlands, wetlands, prairie, and shoreline ecosystems — operates with funding only about $700,000 annually.

In other words, one major street redesign project may equal decades of ecological restoration funding. If healthy ecosystems truly function as climate infrastructure, what does that say about our current priorities?

A Question of Balance
This is not an argument against bicycles, transit, or walkability. It is simply a question of balance.

If we are serious about climate resilience, perhaps we should spend less time arguing only about how to reduce driving and more time asking how to improve the ecological performance of the natural systems already embedded throughout our city.
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And perhaps that is a conversation that should be shared more broadly among the many local governmental bodies now increasingly focused on climate change.

In the hours between ecological restoration fieldwork at Cedar Lake Point Beach, I've been drawn into the task of writing a story to be published in the June issue of the local Hill & Lake Press newspaper about a topic resurrected by the current MPRB commissioners. The topic is about a proposed redesign of a small MPRB-owned parcel in the Uptown retail district called The Mall. 

As detailed in the story that I won't get into here, the lead justification for the $2 million park improvement project is that closing portions of streets owned by the Park Board would add green space to the district. And that any added parkland area is reason enough; that additional parkland is a step in favor of battling the climate crisis.

For context, this project adds just 0.2 acres of green space. That's smaller than most neighborhood "triangle parks" throughout Minneapolis. 

Adding green space is a worthy objective when simply stated and justified, and in isolation sounds reasonable. But when things are considered too simply, they fail to acknowledge complexities of reality, context, and unintended consequences. And in this case, the neighbors surrounding these proposed closed streets are stating to the planners and commissioners as clearly as they can within the public process that The Mall green space is more complicated than a traditional neighborhood park. It's about traffic circulation, access, safety, and more. The question is yet to be answered whether park planning staff and commissioners are open to listening to and fully considering the implications of this project, or will feedback be limited to insignificant design buffs and shines of an immalleable finished product. 

But as I've listened to both sides of this debate and trying to understand the nuances, I keep returning to questioning the supporters stated core purpose of this proposal.

If the park board truly wants to do what it can to cool the planet and create more habitable places by adding green space, might they also if not first consider working with the green space we as a public already possesses? 

MPRB already owns about 1,200 acres of what is classified as Natural Areas. Just 400 of those acres are classified as Managed Natural Areas. That leaves 800 acres that are unmanaged or at best passively managed. Those 800 acres are lying in wait, for restoration, care, attention and the potential to be converted from ecologically unhealthy and humanly unusable space to what could become healthy green space for the very purposes justified by spending $2 million to add 0.2 acres of green space at The Mall. 

Fellow MPRB Park Stewards have been collaborating to get the idea that Natural Areas need more attention and sense of priority when it comes to MPRB budgeting and agenda priorities. The 1% for Natural Areas is far less amount than this redesign of The Mall project alone. 
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I can do a separate blog post about the details behind that initiative. But the point is, investing in MPRB owned properties that are in dire need of improvement is a highly effective and efficient approach to add to the inventory of healthy and usable parklands. We need more than symbolic gestures that add 0.2 acres of green space that disturb the functionality of our urban network. We need actions that seriously improve existing green space for nature, humans, and more significantly contribute to the battling climate change. 

I’m no birder, but like many of the communities I’ve been introduced to through ecological restoration, I downloaded the Merlin app and pulled it out this morning while walking around Cedar Lake Point Beach. At one point, surrounded by so many birdsongs, I simply had to stop and record for a moment. Within about three minutes, the app identified 18 different bird species.

Last year around this time, a neighbor who is an avid birder told me this is peak migration season in Minneapolis, perhaps even the peak week. So many species are briefly stopping here during their seasonal journeys north. For a short time each spring, we become hosts to an incredible wave of traveling birds.

Aves is Latin for birds.

Avenue comes from the French word avenir, meaning “to come to” or “approach.”

Minneapolis sits within the Mississippi Flyway, one of the largest migratory bird corridors in the world. Experts estimate that billions of birds use this flyway each year. The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources estimates that roughly 60 percent of North America’s migratory birds pass through Minnesota during spring and fall migration. Radar-based systems like BirdCast estimate that millions of birds can move over Minnesota in a single night during peak migration season.

That’s a lot of visitors.

And as hosts, it may be worth considering what we can do to accommodate them.

First, let’s consider the needs of our feathered visitors. They primarily need three things: safe places to rest, food to replenish energy, and water and shelter to protect them from predators.
Healthy ecological systems provide exactly that.

A woodland with layered native vegetation supports insects, caterpillars, seeds, berries, and cover. A wetland offers water, emergent plants, and feeding habitat. Shorelines and meadows provide resting areas and rich insect life. Even brief stopovers can determine whether a bird has enough energy reserves to continue northward successfully.

Research increasingly shows that ecological quality matters as much as quantity. A patch of degraded habitat overrun by invasive species may appear green to us but provide far less food and ecological function for birds. A woodland dominated by buckthorn, for example, can support dramatically fewer native insects than one with diverse native understory plants. Since many migrating birds depend heavily on insects, especially protein-rich caterpillars, the difference becomes significant.

That is where ecological restoration becomes more than aesthetics or landscape management. It becomes hospitality.

When volunteers remove invasive species, restore native plant communities, stabilize shorelines, improve wetlands, or allow natural regeneration to occur, they are helping rebuild functioning habitat systems. They are creating places capable of supporting life during one of the most vulnerable phases of a bird’s annual cycle.

Our healthy natural areas are part of a continental network of refuge and replenishment. Cedar Lake, the Chain of Lakes, wetlands, woodlands, and prairie corridors are not isolated green spaces. They are ecological rest stops for migrating birds.

And perhaps that is one of the best ways to think about restoration work: not simply as caring for “our” parks, but as preparing a welcoming place for countless travelers passing through.

As a community, we can make a difference by being good hosts.

A healthy park says to a migrating bird:
You can rest here.
You can feed here.
You can continue your journey from here.

And perhaps that is one of the quiet goals of ecological restoration: helping Minneapolis remain a welcoming stop along one of nature’s great journeys.
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Perhaps we can become a better avenue for the aves passing through.

Today is an exciting day full of hopes and dreams, of new growth, trees, and another step toward restoring Minneapolis’ natural areas.

This morning, I stopped by the MPRB Operations Building to pick up from the Natural Resources staff eight bare-root seedlings. Four Allegheny serviceberry and four pagoda dogwood trees will soon be planted at Cedar Lake Point Beach. I’m one of 17 Park Steward groups across Minneapolis who together picked up 375 trees and shrubs for restoration projects. Around Cedar Lake, volunteers will plant a total of 42 of those trees and shrubs.

Before these pickups, I was part of a group of ecological restoration volunteers who received an email from a community member of the Tree Advisory Commission. Attached was the Park Board’s 2026 tree purchase list of roughly 7,500 trees that will be planted all across the city this year.

Reading through it, I found myself thinking about the difference between the trees we were picking up this morning and the thousands being planted through the city’s broader forestry program. Both efforts matter, but they are not the same.

The Rub

While the Forestry Department has a budget that is roughly ten times the size of the Natural Resources program and is planting many more trees, there is a notable difference in philosophy and objectives. The Forestry Department is driven by a canopy approach. Its metrics focus on how many trees can survive, how they can be protected from disease, and how they perform under harsh urban conditions. The goal is to build a diverse and resilient urban forest that can withstand large-scale losses like those experienced with emerald ash borer.

That approach leads to a certain kind of tree list. It’s one that includes hybrids, cultivars, and non-native species selected for toughness and predictability.

Ecological restoration volunteers and Natural Resources staff operate from a different starting point. The question is not simply whether a tree will grow, but what it will support. Ecology is not a collection of individual trees. It is a living system whose health depends on relationships including habitat, food, timing, and the long-evolved connections between plants, insects, birds, and soil. Not all trees contribute to that system equally.

What the Numbers Show

In a Forestry Department planting program of roughly 7,500 trees, only about 42 percent are native to Minnesota. More than half of what is being planted is made up of hybrids or non-native species. These are trees that may succeed in terms of survival and canopy, but they offer reduced ecological value compared to native species.

This is not to say these trees have no value. They provide shade, resilience, and presence in difficult urban environments. But it does raise an important question: if our goal is ecological restoration, are we planting enough of the trees that fully participate in that system? That question leads to something deeper.

Shade and Systems

There is a line I keep coming back to as I look at these two lists of trees: shade does not breathe; systems do.

Shade is easy to measure. It can be counted, mapped, and valued. It cools streets, lowers temperatures, and makes a place more comfortable for us. In a city, that matters. But shade is an outcome, not the whole story.

Aldo Leopold wrote about land as a community, not just soil and trees, but a living system of relationships. A tree, in that sense, is not just something that grows. It participates in that community, feeding insects, supporting birds, and connecting to soil, water, and seasonal cycles in ways that are often invisible to us. It is part of a network of giving and receiving, sustaining and being sustained. When that reciprocity is missing, something essential is lost. We still get shade, but we do not necessarily get life.

And not all trees participate in that system equally.

We have become very good at solving for shade. Much of the modern urban forestry model is designed to create a resilient canopy that can survive heat, salt, drought, and disease. These are real pressures and they require thoughtful responses. But often when we solve for one thing in isolation, we often miss the larger pattern. It is possible to plant thousands of trees that succeed on their own terms and still fall short of rebuilding the living systems those trees are meant to support.

Across Minneapolis, volunteer Park Stewards are working, tree by tree and place by place, to bring those systems back to life.

Back to the Trees

This morning, I picked up eight trees. They will not change the city on their own, nor will they show up in canopy counts or annual reports in any meaningful way. But they will be planted with a different intention, not just to grow or survive, but to become part of something larger.
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In the end, the question is not simply how many trees we plant. It is what those trees become part of.

Viewing yet another Park Board meeting this week, I watched a well-developed process describing how neighborhood parks move through differing stages of improvement, complete with budgets, timelines, and funding projections. There is a clear set of expectations for how these assets are managed. It raises a question I’ve been asking: why are MPRB’s Natural Areas not treated and managed as a real asset?

While natural areas may not appear on the books as a formal value, they nonetheless possess value. Using conservative assessed land values, the roughly 1,200 acres of Natural Areas represent about $240 million in public assets. That can be difficult to grasp, so consider another frame. A commonly used estimate places the societal value of a human life at roughly $10 million. By that measure, the Park Board and its commissioners are responsible for the equivalent of roughly 24 human lives in the form of natural areas.

The problem is that those 1,200 acres—or metaphorically, those 24 lives—are not healthy. Over time, they have received only a fraction of what was needed to remain viable. Now they are struggling. Some areas are holding on, others are slipping, and some are nearing a point where recovery becomes difficult and uncertain. By the Park Board’s own assessment, more than three-quarters of these natural areas are in poor or very poor ecological condition, with hundreds of acres—especially woodlands—already at the lowest rating. This is not a stable asset holding its value; it is one in decline.

Caring for an asset requires investment. If natural areas were managed like any other Park Board asset, expectations would be straightforward. Departments and commissioners would plan for their care and advocate for the budgets needed to sustain them. A reasonable standard is to invest one to two percent of value annually, which for these lands would mean roughly $2.4 to $4.8 million per year, or about $2,000 to $4,000 per acre, simply to maintain what exists.

Instead, natural areas management has long been funded at a fraction of that level. With an annual budget of roughly $700,000, only about one-third of the system—around 400 acres—is classified as “managed.” Even when combined with the substantial contribution of volunteer park stewards, who contribute roughly equivalent value in time and labor, the total investment reaches about $1.4 million per year. Spread across 1,200 acres, that amounts to just over $1,000 per acre. It reflects effort and commitment, but it does not change the trajectory.

And this is not simply a maintenance issue. It is a repair issue. Moving degraded natural systems toward health requires a different level of investment—closer to five percent, at least for a period of recovery. That translates to roughly $12 million annually, or about $10,000 per acre, a level consistent with what other park systems invest to actively restore and manage natural areas at scale.

While natural areas are identified as part of the Park Board’s mission, they are often treated as something we value rather than something we actively manage. But inaction has consequences. Natural systems are fundamentally different from other assets. When a building fails, it can be rebuilt. When a road deteriorates, it can be resurfaced. When natural systems collapse, they cannot be replaced on any meaningful human timeline. The relationships that define them, built over decades and sometimes centuries, can be lost far faster than they can be restored. When they fail, the foundation of the park system itself begins to erode.

Yet when they are healthy, natural areas are not passive. They do critical work. They filter water before it reaches our lakes, moderate heat, and support biodiversity that is otherwise disappearing. Just as importantly, they provide something increasingly rare for people—especially children: unstructured space to explore, take risks, imagine, escape, heal, and simply be. We spend millions each year trying to deliver those outcomes through green infrastructure, programs, and facilities. Much of that work is valuable. But healthy natural areas can provide many of these benefits every day, without ongoing operating costs, staffing, scheduling, or barriers. They are not separate from the Park Board’s mission; they are foundational to it.

The question is whether commissioners treat them that way. To be fair, commissioners are not making decisions in a vacuum. The demands are real and often immediate. Facilities need repair. Programs serve communities in visible ways. Equity requires sustained investment. There are always more needs than resources. But natural areas have long been the quiet line item, making them easy to overlook and underestimate.

Delay in offering needed care makes the outcome harder, more costly, and in some cases impossible to reverse. At this stage, inaction carries consequences, and time is not neutral—it cannot be replaced.

Over the course of a commissioner’s term, these lands will change. The question is not whether they will, but how. Will they continue to decline, quietly losing function and becoming more difficult to repair, or will this be the moment when their trajectory begins to shift? The condition is known. The gap between what is needed and what is being invested is clear. What remains is the decision to act—recognizing these lands for what they are, setting a standard for their care, and committing the resources necessary to restore them.
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These natural areas fall squarely under the responsibility of the Park Board and its commissioners. What will the commissioners do?

April in Minnesota might be one of the toughest months. It teases us. Last week we felt hints of warmth, just enough to make it feel like we were turning a corner. And then today it was back to 19 degrees. The landscape is still largely gray and brown, caught between seasons, not quite ready to let go of winter.

And yet, this is the time when the first signs begin to appear. Not the season itself, just hints of sight and sound.

This afternoon, walking through The Conservancy on the northeast side of Cedar Lake, I came across the first real color I have seen this year. A small patch of blue. It popped. It stopped me more than I expected, and I had to take a picture. And then I realized it was Siberian squill.

And then, almost immediately, another thought followed. This is not what we are trying to grow here.

Siberian squill is one of those early bloomers that shows up before most other plants have even emerged. It takes advantage of this brief window before the tree canopy fills in, when sunlight still reaches the forest floor. It is easy to see why it spreads. It feels like spring. But it is not native to these woodlands, and if left alone, it can crowd out the species that belong here, the ones that are part of a healthy woodland ecosystem. So I found myself reacting:  The color, welcome. The plant, not so much.

I’m still learning how to read the woods, and I’ve been hearing more and more from friends about “ephemerals.” I found myself asking, is this one? As it turns out, the word ephemeral simply means short-lived, something that appears briefly and then disappears. In ecology, spring ephemerals are those early woodland plants that emerge before the canopy closes, bloom quickly, and then retreat underground for the rest of the year. They are easy to miss, but they are also some of the most telling plants in a woodland. Not because they last, but because of what they indicate.

The native ephemerals we hope to see here, trillium, bloodroot, Dutchman’s breeches, spring beauty, are not just beautiful. They are evidence. They tell us that light is reaching the ground in the right way, that soils are intact, that the relationships beneath the surface are functioning well enough to support them. In that sense, they are small, passing signs of a deeper health that we cannot otherwise see.

As I kept walking, it was hard not to sit with the fact that we do not yet have enough of that, at least not consistently. There are places where the system is still too closed off, too dominated by invasive growth, for those native ephemerals to return in any meaningful way. It made that first flash of color feel a little deceptive, at least if I had not paused long enough to ask what it really meant.

It would be easy to read the squill as reassurance. Spring is coming. Nature is doing its work. Everything will take care of itself. But that is not what I’m seeing in these woods.

What I see instead is potential. And the reminder that potential does not fulfill itself.

These woodlands do not return to health simply because the seasons turn. They recover because people show up and do the work. Because buckthorn is cut back. Because overgrowth is cleared. Because light is allowed to reach the forest floor again. Because soils are protected and space is made for native plants to return. Without that, the system does not reset. It continues on the path it is already on.

And so those early signs begin to take on a different meaning. They are not the outcome. They are not even the beginning. They are more like an opening, a brief glimpse of what could be there under the right conditions.

By the time I made my way out of The Conservancy, I found myself looking differently at everything around me. I was reminded and encouraged that the gray and brown are not empty. It felt like a place with something just beneath the surface. Not visible yet,  but possible.

Maybe that is what April in Minnesota is really about. Not comfort, but a reminder. Renewal does not happen passively. It is within reach, but it requires action. What we are seeing now, these small, fleeting signs, are not the season itself, but signals of what might come if we are willing to do what is required to bring it forward. (Or we could continue to ignore it and allow the invasives to progress in destroying and eliminating our ecological systems.)

Even in the cold of today, I found myself thinking, hope springs eternal. But for now, it shows itself only in brief, ephemeral ways.

I have spent a lot of time over the past few years working at and around Cedar Lake Point Beach, cutting buckthorn and opening up areas that had been overgrown for years. In doing that work, I have run into a pattern that has been hard to ignore.

There are things that clearly need to be done in our natural areas and parklands. Cuttings need to be removed. Sand needs to be replaced on the beach where erosion and use have taken a toll. Benches and picnic tables need repair or replacement. Trees that are half fallen should be taken down before they become hazards. These are not large or complicated projects. They are the kinds of things that could be contracted out and completed without much difficulty. And yet, they often do not get done.

It is not because they are unknown, and it is not because people do not care. It is because there is no clear path to move them forward.

Over time, neighbors and park users have asked me a simple question: can we just donate the money and get this done? Sometimes it is a few thousand dollars, sometimes more, but enough to make a visible difference in a specific natural area. And my answer has usually been the same. I don’t really know.

That uncertainty has been sitting there for a long time. Even when there are funds available through groups like the Cedar Lake Park Association, there is often no straightforward way to implement projects like these. The concern behind that is understandable. We do not want a system where natural areas in neighborhoods with more resources are repaired and maintained while others fall further behind. But the result is a kind of standstill. We see the need, we have people willing to help, and sometimes we even have the money, yet the work does not happen.

At the same time, the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board has been discussing priorities, and one of the top priority is the need to identify new revenue sources. Typically, that search looks outward to state funding, federal programs, or large philanthropic partners like the Minneapolis Park Foundation. Those sources matter, but they often come with constraints. Funding is tied to capital projects, infrastructure, or specific initiatives. Rarely, it seems, are funds available to supports the ongoing care, repair, and ecological management needs of natural areas.

So we end up with a disconnect. The needs are local, sometimes painfully visible, and immediate within specific natural areas, while the funding is distant, structured, and often directed elsewhere.

This raises a simple question. What if we made it easier for people to act on what they see in the natural areas they care about, and at the same time addressed the concern about equity across the system?

Call it Twin Giving. Or maybe something like a Twin Care Fund, or simply Care for Natural Areas. The name matters less than the idea behind it.

If someone raises or donates money to address a need in a specific natural area, that contribution could be split evenly. Half goes directly to the locally identified project, and half goes into a dedicated fund managed by the Park Board to support natural areas in underserved neighborhoods.

In other words, every act of local giving within a natural area carries with it an equal investment in the broader system of natural areas.

In a way, it works like a reflection. What begins in one place does not stay there. It carries outward, taking shape somewhere else. Not as an abstract idea, but as real work on the ground in another part of the system.

This is not about charity layered on top of a project. It is built into the structure from the beginning. You take care of your place, and at the same time you help take care of the whole.

What makes this approach seem compelling is that it has the potential to unlock specific action without ignoring inequity. People who are willing to step up no longer run into a dead end, and the system does not rely on uneven patterns of giving to determine which natural areas improve. Instead, fairness is embedded in the act of giving itself.

It also reflects something fundamental about how natural areas function. No landscape exists in isolation. Water moves, seeds disperse, wildlife travels, and ecological health is interconnected across the system. A funding model that recognizes that interconnectedness is stronger and more aligned with how these places actually work.

If the goal is to identify new revenue sources, this is one that starts close to home. It does not depend on large external funding streams or new taxes. It has the potential to build on something that already exists, which is people who care enough to notice and are willing to act. Whether we call it Twin Giving or something else, it turns that care into a structured source of support that benefits the entire system of natural areas, not just the places that already have momentum.

This kind of approach would require thoughtful design, including clear guidelines, transparency, and a fair method for identifying which natural areas in underserved areas are most in need. But those are solvable challenges.

What matters first is recognizing an opportunity. We already live in a system where people are willing to give. And I have no idea of how much this system might generate. The question is whether we can design a system that allows that generosity to work for all of our natural areas.

In the Twin Cities, is this an idea worth trying?